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April 10, 2002
Michael Neumann
Israelis and Indians
April 9, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
Colin
Powell's Table Talk
Matt Vidal
Thomas Friedman,
Another Wasted Pulitzer
Ron Jacobs
Buyer
Beware
Robert Jensen
I Helped Kill a Palestinian
Vijay
Prashad
Memories
of Barbarity:
Sharonism and September
Wayne Madsen
Anthrax and the Agency:
Thinking the Unthinkable
April 8, 2002
David
Vest
From
Birmingham to Nashville:
The Making of Tammy Wynette
Rick Giombetti
Paxil, Suicide and Science
Dr. Neve
Gordon
Letter
to an IDF Colonel:
How Did You Become
a War Criminal?
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
This Week's Top 10 CDs
Jordy
Cummings
Not
in My Name Anymore
Gavin Keeney
Bush and the Middle East:
Mouth Wide Shut
Edward
Said
The
Future of Palestine
April 7, 2002
Beth Daoud
Accompanying Ambulances
in Bethlehem
Nancy
Stohlman
After
the Invasion:
The Search for Bread
Among the Ruins
Thomas Mountain
"Yellow Peril" In Hawai'i:
Judge Orders Chains and Shackles for Chinese Witnesses
Tariq
Ali
Who
Killed Daniel Pearl?
April 6, 2002
Philip Farruggio
War, Snake Oil and Circuses
Viktor
Litovkin
Russian
Generals Raise Questions About Pentagon Victories in Afghanistan
Patrick Cockburn
CIA Survey of Iraqi Airfields
May Herald Attack
Walt Brasch
Oil
Slick George:
Bush-whacking the Environment
Ralph Nader
Campaign Finance Sham
Sam Bahour
The
Blind Leading the Criminal
Bill Christison:
A Former CIA Official on
Oil and the Middle East
April 5, 2002
Charmaine
Seitz
In
Ramallah: The Grueling Reoccupation Grinds On
Nancy Stohlman
The Invasion of Bethlehem
and Our Tax Dollars at Work
Beth Daoud
The
Siege of Bethlehem:
"What Do You Mean God Is Punishing Me?"
Fareed Marjaee:
Demonizing Iran
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Philip
Morris to Canada:
"Drop Dead"
Alex Lynch
Tampa Campus Mirrors
Middle East Strife
Alexander
Cockburn
Sharon's
Wars: How the
News Gets Through
April 4, 2002
Ray Hanania
Sharon's Latest Lie About the Church
of the Nativity
Mike Leon
Rightwing
Assault on Madison Progressives Misfires
Tom Turnipseed
Stop the Killing Now!
Nancy
Stohlman
An
American Under Siege in a West Bank Refugee Camp
Christopher Reilly
Kissinger, Chile and Justice
at Long Last?
M. Shahid
Alam
The
Lies of Thomas Friedman
April 3, 2002
Don Henley
Dear Loathsome Trade Hacks
Bernard
Weiner
An
American Jew Talks
About His Shame
David Vest
Sting of Stings
Gabriel Ash
America's Bravest
John Chuckman
Of
War, Islam and Israel
Robert Fisk
The Siege of Bethlehem
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Sins of the Church
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
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Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
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April 10, 2002
World Bank to West Bank:
The
Movement Written Off After September 11 is Demonstrating Its
Worth in Palestine
By George Monbiot
Two sets of human shields are in use in the West
Bank. The first is less than willing. The Israeli army, like
some of the terrorist groups it has fought, has been taking hostages.
Its soldiers have been propelling Palestinian civilians through
the doors of suspect buildings, so that the gunmen they might
harbor have to kill them first if they want to fight back.
The second set of human shields has deliberately
placed itself in the line of fire. Since the army's offensive
in the West Bank began, hundreds of Israeli peace campaigners
and foreign activists have been seeking to put themselves in
its way. At great personal risk, members of the International
Solidarity Movement have sought to protect civilians by making
hostages of themselves. It is a display of extraordinary courage
and self-sacrifice. It is also the latest incarnation of a movement
which just months ago was left for dead.
The movement to which many of the peace
activists risking their lives in Ramallah and Bethlehem belong
has no name. Some people have called it an anti-globalization
or anti-corporate or anti-capitalist campaign. Others prefer
to emphasize its positive agenda, calling it a democracy or internationalist
movement. But, because they have always put practice first and
theory second, its members have proved impossible to categorize.
Whenever it appears to have assumed an identity outsiders believe
they can grasp, it morphs into something else. It is driven by
a new, responsive politics, informed not by ideology but by need.
After September 11, this nameless thing
appeared to vanish as swiftly as it had emerged. The huge demonstrations
planned for the end of September against the World Bank and IMF
in Washington became a small and rather timorous march for peace.
Most US activists, cowed by the new McCarthyism which has dominated
American discourse since the attack on New York, kept their heads
down. Commentators dismissed the movement as a passing fad which
had rippled through the world's youth, as widespread and as insubstantial
as Diet Coke or the Nike swoosh.
But those who dismissed it had failed
to grasp either the seriousness of its intent or the breadth
of its support. The television cameras always focused on a few
hundred young men dressed in black and running riot, intercut
occasionally with the wider carnival of protest. But they seldom
permitted its participants to explain the sense of purpose which
propelled them. So most outsiders failed to see that the commitment
of many of the people involved in these protests is non-negotiable.
The movement is no more likely to go away than the governments
and corporations it confronts. Its survival is assured by its
ability to become whatever it needs to be.
Last month 250,000 protesters travelled
to Barcelona to contest the assault on employment laws and the
public sector being led by Tony Blair, Silvio Berlusconi and
Jose Maria Aznar. This month some of them moved to Palestine.
Among those in the British contingent are people who have helped
to run campaigns against corporate power, genetic engineering
and climate change. They were joined this week by members of
the Italian organization Ya Basta, which helped to coordinate
the protests in Genoa. For the movement which came of age in
Seattle, the World Bank and the West Bank belong to the same
political territory.
If the protesters simply shifted as a
mob from one location to another, their efforts would be worse
than useless. But one of the key lessons this rapidly maturing
movement has learned is that protest is effective only if it
builds on the efforts of specialists. Like most of the Earth's
people, the foreigners on the West Bank became visible when they
began to bleed (five British campaigners were injured last week
by the Israeli army's illegal fragmentation bullets), but some
outsiders have been working there for decades. New arrivals join
long-established networks and do what they are told. Among the
bullets and the bulldozers, the movement is discovering a courage
long suspected but seldom tried.
Protesters have moved into the homes
of people threatened with bombardment by the Israeli army, ensuring
that the soldiers cannot attack Palestinians without attacking
foreigners too. They have been sitting in the ambulances taking
sick or injured people to hospital, in the hope of speeding their
passage through Israeli checkpoints and preventing the soldiers
from beating up the occupants. They have been trying to run convoys
of food and medicine into neighborhoods deprived of supplies;
and seeking to encourage both sides to lay down their arms in
favor of non-violent solutions. They are becoming, in other words,
a sort of grassroots United Nations, trying with their puny resources
to keep the promises their governments have broken.
Perhaps most importantly, the peace campaigners
are the only foreign witnesses in some places to the atrocities
being committed. Using alternative news networks such as Indymedia
and Allsorts, they have been able to draw attention to events
most journalists have missed.
They have seen how Palestinians, told
by the Israeli army that the curfew had been lifted, have been
either shot dead when they stepped outside or seized and used
as human shields. They have witnessed the sacking of homes and
the deliberate destruction of people's food supplies. They have
seen ambulances and aid trucks being stopped and crushed. On
March 28 one peace protester watched Israeli soldiers in jeeps
hunting women and children who were fleeing across the fields
on the outskirts of Ramallah, trying to shoot them down in cold
blood. And, by becoming the story themselves, as they are beaten
and shot, the foreigners have brought it home to people who were
dismissive of the murder and maiming of indigenous civilians.
The movement's arrival on the West Bank
is an organic development of its activities elsewhere. For years
it has been contesting the destructive foreign policies of the
world's most powerful governments, and the corresponding failures
of the multilateral institutions to contain them. Rather than
echo the thunderous but effete demand of commentators on both
sides of the Atlantic that Yasser Arafat (a man currently unable
to use a flushing toilet) should stamp out the terror in the
Middle East, the campaigners are, as ever, addressing those who
wield real power: Israel and the governments who supply the money
and weaponry which permit it to occupy the West Bank. The movement
has always been a pragmatic one, as ready to protest against
Burma's treatment of its tribal people or China's dispossession
of the Tibetans as the IMF's handling of Argentina. In Palestine,
as elsewhere, it is seeking to place itself between power and
those whom power afflicts.
Everyone else is demanding that somebody
should do something about the conflict in the Middle East. The
peace campaigners are doing it.
George Monbiot
writes for the Guardian of London. Please visit his website:
http://www.monbiot.com.
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